Pancreatic cancer is the fifth most common cause of tumor-related deaths in the industrialized world. Fewer than 10% to 20% of patients are candidates for surgery at the time of presentation, and fewer than 20% of patients who undergo curative resection are alive after 5 years. Despite recent progress, there is no modality for early detection of pancreatic cancer. There have not been many reports of effective treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer either local or metastatic disease. Therefore, there is a need to develop new treatments that are effective for pancreatic cancer, and methods to prevent pancreatic cancer progression.
It is known that the gene expression patterns are complexly different between normal and cancerous cells. With regard to various cancer researches, it was proposed that the genomic landscape consists of the most frequently mutated genes, and hundreds of less frequently mutated cancer-associated genes. Using breast cancer as an example, many studies have investigated genomic instability such as copy number alteration and DNA amplification and deletion affecting commonly amplified regions in the genome. However, most of these global genomic studies of high-frequency genetic events have not revealed any additional genes that contain alterations potentially affecting breast cancer development, which is true to pancreatic cancer research as well. Therefore, there is a need to take a different approach, i.e., looking into low-frequency alterations, to identify novel genes that may facilitate treatment development for pancreatic cancer.